As I suspected, New Yorker editors seemed to have simply not believed Seymour Hersh’s contrarian reportage about the killing of Osama bin Laden which wound up published in the London Review of Books. So much is at stake here, journalistically as well as politically, as Hersh being correct would mean that essentially every American news organization was guilty of a dereliction of duty on par with the one many committed in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. But Hersh’s sources, few and murky, aren’t proof on their own of any such grand failing.

Max Fisher of Vox lays into Hersh’s revisionist narrative but good, speaking along the way to the passage that struck me as the most fabulistic: the terrorist’s corpse being flung piece by piece from a helicopter. I guess anything’s possible in this crazy world, but asserting behavior that insane requires some sort of clear confirmation. An excerpt:

As for Hersh’s story of what really happened to bin Laden’s body — “torn to pieces with rifle fire” and thrown bit by bit out the door of the escaping helicopter, until there was not enough left to bury — it is difficult to know where to begin. It is outlandish to imagine small arms fire reducing a 6-foot-4 man “to pieces,” not to mention the sheer quantity of time and bullets this would take. Are we really to believe that special forces would spend who knows how long gleefully carving up bin Laden like horror movie villains, and then later reaching into the body bag to chuck pieces of him out of a helicopter, for no reason at all? On the most sensitive and important operation of their careers?•